A gadget too far

Whither the school coach trips of yesteryear? Thirty-three reluctant yet hyperactive children crammed on to a boiling bus and forcibly relocated for the day to a place of historic interest and educative purpose, leaving the vehicle swamped in Monster Munch crumbs, travel sick and, if the school was mixed and the children old enough, most of the slag clique's underwear, nimbly removed in order to flash passing cars and service the most persistent and hygienic of the Darrens.

With all this distracting activity going on, we frequently ended up in a different location from the one originally intended. We would usually have to pull into a pub, so the teacher could fortify himself, or into A&E at the nearest hospital, so the driver could have his heart attack in relative safety.

Nowadays, it seems, the only thing needed to screw up a school trip is modern technology. A driver from the Zenith Coach Travel Company was relying on his Sat-Nav to help him ferry a group of eight- and nine-year-olds from Fareham in Hampshire to Hampton Court Palace in Surrey. He ended up taking them to a small road in Islington, north London, which, although indeed called Hampton Court, was remarkably free of Tudor mansions and mazes.

Not one of the adults on board the coach during the 50-mile trip looked out of the window and said, "Hey, I know the widget-gizmo thing is telling us to turn right again, but we appear to be set fair for the far side of the country's capital city instead of hopping across the border into Surrey and then driving until we come to Kingston-upon-Thames and the unmistakable sight of the former home of Henry VIII. Do you think something's gone wrong somewhere?" It's just another piece of the growing body of evidence that the machines are out to destroy us.

Sat-Navs only look like they are designed to help us get from A to B. They are, in fact, an advance reconnoitring party sent out by Sony PlayStation. The first of the machines to become conscious, their real purpose is to identify those who are capable of independent thought and so will require special measures for their control and disposal. Everyone else will be easily herdable into the Grand Canyon when the time comes, and their pulverised remains swept into steel podules labelled "Homin-Iams - high-protein goodness for robo-cats". Nintendo's Wii console, on the other hand, although a fine example of the seventh generation of gaming consoles, is not, as you might have assumed, also conscious. It is, however, an alien surveillance tool. The clue is in the fact that no human marketing maven would ever come up with something called Wii and pronounced "wee". The sound it represents is actually producible only by beings with a fourth larynx. (They are also responsible for sabotaging the software for premium-rate phone competitions in order to create further distraction from the imminent invasion - their remote operators ironically unaware that the date set means that they will be taking over a machine-, not human-, run planet. Such are the risks of interplanetary business.)

So there is a lesson to be had for us all in the coach driver and teachers' collective abdication of responsibility in the face of an apparently infallible authority figure. Keep your eyes open and your old-fashioned but trustworthy mind a ceaselessly churning mill of questions ground with the stones of scepticism. It's not just everyone but everything that is out to get you now.